Using Qassia: An Intelligent Decision? - Rating and Screening Intel
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Rating intel is fairly straightforward. You visit the part of Qassia's site that lets you search for and access intel. I haven't yet shown you a screen shot of this part of the company's site, so here it is:
As you can see from a glance at the keyword cloud on the left, Qassia offers a nice variety of topics, including SEO. It also includes images of recently active users (or at least the images that these users have chosen to provide). Now, you should know that this isn't the entire search page; Qassia can't seem to avoid making you scroll down. So here's another screen shot:
Here you can see the actions that have happened in the past 24 hours, and on the left you can see intel that is waiting to be screened (I'll talk more about that in a bit). To avoid putting in yet another screen shot, I'll just describe the rest of the page. There is a list of the freshest intel, a list of hot intel, and another box on the left hand side for site updates.
To rate intel, you make sure you are logged into the site, find a piece of intel, read it, and then click on the stars. The intel rating is at the bottom of the article, which encourages you to read it all the way through. You can also click on the comment button here and leave a comment. The system uses a radio button, but nothing is checked by default; here I'm giving someone a middle of the road rating for a half-description, half-rant about black hat, white hat, Google and SEO:
You'll notice there's a link that says "flag this intel." If you believe a particular piece of intel has not been correctly classified, Qassia encourages to flag the intel. If a contributor's intel is flagged more than once, Qassia will take a look at that intel - and if the flag is correct (i.e. the person incorrectly classified the intel), Qassia will ban the user.
Screening intel is not the same thing as rating intel. Just as with rating intel, any registered user can do it - and you earn Qassia dollars for it. See, when you submit intel to Qassia, it doesn't go live immediately; it has to be screened first. There is a box on every page that lists intel waiting to be screened. Screening is designed to be easy; here's the screening box at the bottom of the article I chose to screen:
As you can see, there are only four conditions that bring on an outright rejection. You also have the option to leave feedback for the author if you think it will improve the intel. This is important, since only the author can modify the intel. Rather than bringing up a screen in which to type text, though, clicking the feedback link yields a list of items for the author to examine, involving such matters as narrative flow, better formatting, including links, fact-checking, etc. On the up side, the list seemed to cover most of the kinds of issues that one would typically see when reading/editing an article.
Intel must be screened by a minimum of 12 users before being published or rejected. Not only can authors not rate their own intel, but if you have referred the author to Qassia (or vice versa), you cannot rate the intel. And just to make sure this doesn't happen, the link to the screening page is disabled if any of these conditions is true. Oh, and you can't screen an intel more than once; as with the other conditions, the link to the screening page is disabled if you've screened a particular intel before.
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